Prometheus enabled us to centralise our alerting without compromising on functionality or having to worry about increasing licensing costs
July 25, 2022
Prometheus enabled us to centralise our alerting without compromising on functionality or having to worry about increasing licensing costs
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Prometheus
Prometheus is our tool of choice for collecting and aggregating metrics about the services we run. It is also our primary way of generating alerts; alerting is very important for us and we actively encourage developers to take any edge cases and errors that may arise into account as part of building any new services. Prometheus has been a good system to aid us with implementing this goal; furthermore, during an outage it allows us to quickly diagnose problems.
- Looking at metrics such as the aggregate number of HTTP requests served.
- Understanding how our services are performing in aggregate.
- Easy to deploy within a variety of architectures/environments.
- Open source so new features are added regularly and bugs are fixed in a timely manner.
- Free so there are no licensing restrictions.
- Endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
- Not a good choice if you need very high levels of accuracy with regards to collecting 100% of a certain type of data.
- The user interface does not have much eye candy which helps you focus on what you need to see but can appear very basic in its design sometimes.
- PromQL does have a high learning curve.
- Not great for high cardinality data types.
- Unlike other platforms, Prometheus does not have a macro system.
- PromQL is very functional for developers who have previous exposure to the syntax.
- Alertmanager can be configured to send to a Slack channel, for example.
- Free, open source and easy on resources.
- Many deployment options and can integrate with multiple architectures.
- Endorsed by Cloud Native Computing Foundation so unlikely to end up abandoned in the long term like some other open source initiatives.
- Works well for various metrics and most numerical data types.
- Enables our developers to self serve, act on alerting and provide more robust services
- Eliminated cost concerns for our budget as Prometheus is easy on resources, scales well and there is no restrictive license where you pay more based on the number of machines etc.
- Due to the powerful syntax, helped centralise our alerting from various proprietary systems
- Endorsed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we have confidence the feature set will only keep getting better and there is little risk of abandonment
Prometheus is similar to some of its competitors but delivers with regards to metrics; being used internally by Google and other cloud-native companies like ours gives us the confidence that the alerting industry stakeholders view it as a long-term solution that the community will keep nurturing and improving. Proprietary solutions have an associated licensing cost which will only increase as we get more machines and grow our company whereas Prometheus is easy to deploy and scales without massive additional operating costs.
Do you think Prometheus delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Prometheus's feature set?
Yes
Did Prometheus live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Prometheus go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Prometheus again?
Yes